This book is a portmanteau, to borrow a handy word from Lewis Carroll, and misuse it slightly. It’s two books packed into one. There’s the real book, The Detox Mono Diet, and within it the entire text of Johanna Brandt’s classic The Grape Cure.

Brandt was a South African woman, not a medical person, who believed herself to have been cured of a debilitating and presumably terminal stomach cancer through a diet of grapes, and grapes alone. In 1928, she published first an article and then a pamphlet outlining her experience and her success.

If you’re already a believer in detox diets and healing fasts, this book will simply confirm your conviction. If not, I invite you to read it – it’s short and simple so it won’t take much time out of your busy schedule. Author Vasey, a naturopath, goes to great lengths to explain how detoxification dieting works, including uncomfortable details about how to administer an enema (things your mother never taught you) and otherwise prepare your body for the trials of eating little or eating a lot of only one food for protracted periods of time (or maybe they just seem protracted!).

Brandt was convinced, for whatever reason, that her cancer was a combination of genetic factors and the consumption of meat. The grape was for her the antidote, ripping through the gut like a mini-roto-rooter, routing any bits and pieces not tidied up by the enemas.

But not just externally does the grape do its cleansing job. A powerful diuretic, grapes leach poisonous waters from the cells, acting like sweat during a fever to draw out liquid and literally squeeze the body dry of its harmful guests. This is Brandt’s notion and she stuck by it; Vasey concurs

There are other foods suitable for a mono-diet, all raw veggies or fruits with the exception of some dried fruits and cooked grains. All have the same laxative and diuretic effect of grapes. Different foods yield different results on the mono-diet. Needless, perhaps, to say, all of these foods are vegetal, not animal. Cooked foods, many alternative nutritionists suggest, are soft and easier to eat and thus encourage over-eating, as well as having lost nutrients in the heating process. Think about it.

My ex-but-one husband years ago tried the grape cure, having enthusiastically read Brandt’s little book. He was already slim as a trout but that wasn’t his issue. He had bowel problems and was looking for real healing. The net effect of the diet seemed to be that along with losing, unnecessarily in my opinion as an observer, even more weight, he stayed in a vaguely drunken state most of the time. This is perhaps relative to Brandt’s statement that “the matchless grape is the supreme remedy for the craving of alcoholic liquors.” I would add, because the grape diet is a fermentation process carried on within one’s digestive tract! My ex giggled a lot during his ten-day regimen, and though there was no long-term hoped-for amelioration, he expressed a high opinion of the grape cure. He is still alive so the possibility exists that the grape cure did preserve him these 40 years.

For those who are serious about cleaning the insides of their bodies, there is probably no better method than the grape diet, followed to the letter. Vasey’s book augments Brandt’s work and gives good modern information to back it up.